Eclipsed Hearts

Chapter 15: There was a caught

Bianca's office smelled like money and formaldehyde, and Elena had barely crossed the threshold before she understood this wasn't a courtesy visit.

"Sit," Bianca said, not looking up from the file open on her desk. She was still in the cream suit from the courtyard, sunglasses discarded now, and without them her eyes were harder than Elena expected.

Elena sat.

Bianca closed the file with two fingers and finally lifted her gaze. "You're a smart girl, Elena. Top of your class, I was told. Quick and observant." Each word landed with the precision of something rehearsed. "I like smart. Smart girls make good decisions. She smiled and it didn't reach anywhere near her eyes. "I'd hate for you to become a problem."

"I don't know what you mean," Elena said, keeping her voice level, though her pulse had kicked up hard against her ribs.

"Of course you don't." Bianca rose, came around the desk, and studied her the way a jeweler studies a stone for flaws. "I'm simply letting you know I'll be paying closer attention to you. Personally, consider it a compliment." She reached out and tucked a loose strand of hair behind Elena's ear, the gesture so maternal and so wrong that it took everything Elena had not to flinch. "That's all, you may go."

Elena walked out on legs that didn't feel entirely her own, Faye's brittle smile waiting to escort her back down the corridor, and she understood, with a cold certainty that settled somewhere under her sternum, that she had just been marked.

She found Rosa in their room, but Rosa wasn't alone, Lisa was there too, perched on the edge of Rosa's bed with her hands pressed flat against her rounded belly, her face bloodless in a way that had nothing to do with pregnancy.

"Elena." Lisa's eyes darted to her like it was calculating something. "I don't—maybe I should leave—"

"She's fine," Rosa said quickly, moving to sit beside Lisa, taking her hand. "Elena's one of us. Whatever you tell me, you can tell her."

One of us, the phrase snagged oddly in Elena's mind, there was something in Lisa's face right now that swallowed every other thought.

"What happened?" Elena asked, sitting slowly on the end of her own bed.

Lisa's hands trembled against the swell of her stomach. "I got turned around today, coming back from the other wing, the restricted hallway, past the second checkpoint. I wasn't trying to go there, I swear, I just—the door was propped, and I heard Bianca's voice, and I thought maybe there was a nurse who could point me back, so I got close enough to hear." She swallowed hard. "She was on a call with someone, talking about delivery windows and matching preferences. Hair color, eye color, health screenings like she was talking about a product , Elena. Then she said—" Lisa's voice cracked, dropped to barely a whisper. "She said, 'the girl won't even know, it's protocol, they don't know or allowed to meet the imaginary intended parents."

The room went very still.

"That doesn't—" Elena's mouth had gone dry. "That doesn't mean anything. Every surrogacy arrangement has intended parents lined up. That's how surrogacy works."

"Elena." Lisa's eyes were wet now, wide and frightened in a way that made the hair on Elena's arms rise. "There were three more calls after that one. Three more babies, different due dates, different specs, like she was running down an order sheet. This isn't an agency matching surrogates to families who signed up nine months ago. This is—" She pressed a shaking hand to her mouth. "I think we're not surrogates. I think we're a supply chain. I think they sell the babies and sometimes us too.

"That's insane," Elena breathed, even as something cold and slow was uncoiling in her stomach, a hundred small wrongnesses she'd chalked up to strict policy suddenly rearranging themselves into something far uglier, the confiscated phones, the cameras in the vents, the punishing tightness of a place that called itself a fertility center and behaved like they're hiding something sacred. "People can't just sell babies, there are laws, there are agencies that check—"

"Are there?" Rosa's voice was quiet, steady, too steady.

Elena looked at her — really looked, for the first time since Lisa had started talking and something in Rosa's face wasn't matching the horror in the room. Rosa wasn't pale, her hands weren't shaking. Rosa was watching Lisa with something that looked almost like sympathy for a thing she already understood far too well.

"You're not surprised," Elena said slowly.

Something flickered behind Rosa's eyes, gone almost before Elena caught it. "I've heard things. "You hear things here."

She squeezed Lisa's hand again, gentle, grounding. "Which is exactly why we need to be smart about this. No panicking and no confrontations. We keep our heads down and we figure out what to do with what we know."

It was reasonable. It was, on its face, exactly the kind of caution Rosa had counseled before, over the hidden microphone, over the vent. But something about how quickly she'd folded the panic away, how neatly she already had a plan, sat wrong in Elena's chest, a small persistent splinter she didn't have room to examine right now. Elena had started suspecting her.

All Elena could think about was Bianca's hand tucking hair behind her ear. I'll be paying closer attention to you, personally. What does that even mean? She asked herself.

She remembered every stroller-sized cradle sketched on the nursery mockups Faye had shown them during orientation, every glossy brochure promising families waiting with open arms. She thought of her own body, growing something inside it that she had been told, over and over, was going to a family who wanted it desperately.

Maybe that part, at least, was even true. Maybe that was the whole horror of it, that it wasn't a lie so much as a transaction dressed up in the language of love.

"I need to know for certain," Elena said quietly.

Rosa's head came up sharp. "Elena—"

"I'm not doing anything reckless, I just need to see something. The way Lisa did." Elena was already standing, her heartbeat loud in her own ears. "If I can get close to that office again—"

"That's exactly what she warned you against," Rosa said, low and urgent. "She just told you she's watching you. You go anywhere near that wing tonight and you're not smart, you're finished."

"Then I'll be careful." Elena was already moving toward the door, some reckless certainty propelling her past the fear, past Rosa's hand reaching for her sleeve and missing. "I have to know."

The corridor was darker than she remembered, the overhead lights dimmed to their night setting, her own footsteps too loud against the tile no matter how carefully she placed them. The restricted door Lisa had described stood ahead, propped exactly as before, a thin blade of light spilling from the gap.

Elena pressed herself to the wall beside it, heart hammering, and leaned in close enough to hear Bianca's voice, low and drifting from somewhere inside.

"...the second batch will be ready by—"

A hand closed around Elena's shoulder from behind, firm and absolute, and every ounce of blood in her body went to ice.

"I told you," Bianca's voice said, no longer coming from inside the room at all, but directly behind her, soft and almost pleased, "that I'd be paying closer attention."